The thought police

Keith John Sampson is in his 50s, a janitor at IUPUI and also 10 credit hours away from gettting a degree there. While on break one day, he was reading a book about an early incident in Indiana involving the KKK. An employee complained that Sampson was "racially harassing" her by reading the book in front of her. You can guess what happens next. He got a letter from IUPUI's Affirmative Action Office warning him that he had "demonsrated disdain and insensitivity" to his co-workers, and he was ordered to stop reading the book in their presence. The story notes a particular injustice that is being perpetrated against Sampson. The book, "Notre Dame vs. the Klan; How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan," is actually very anti-Klan:

The book is about how for two days in May 1924, a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight with members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was meeting in South Bend for the express purpose of sticking a collective thumb in the eye of the country's most famous Catholic university. Notre Dame vs. the Klan was a Notre Dame Magazine “Pick of the Week” and garnered an average customer review of 4.5 stars on Amazon.com. In its review, The Indiana Magazine of History noted that Tucker “succeeds in placing the event in a broad framework that includes the origins and development of both the Klan and Notre Dame.”

That aspect does raise the university's indefensible anti-intellectualism to comic-opera heights. Sampson apparently tried to explain what the book was about, but nobody was interested; the mere presence of a book about the Klan was enough of a crime to set the thought police in motion.

But to buy into that aspect is, in a way, to legitimize the university officials' casual thuggery. If the book had actually been a bad book, you see, their actions would have been justified. They just happened to make a mistake this time and chastised him for reading a good book. Just be more careful next time, people.

Whatever happened to the intellectual freedom universities are supposed to champion? It shouldn't matter what book he was reading -- not what its subject matter was or what opinions it expressed. People who calim to be traumatized by the act of seeing someone read a book are not really too delicate to leave the house. They are just looking to wield power. Sadly, they have too many willing accomplises these days.